Rampant censorship at Uncommon Descent has left many of us banned and unable to post comments there. Others are able to post but are subject to having their comments delayed in the moderation queue, defaced, or deleted altogether at the whims of moderators (such as UD “President” Barry Arrington*) whose egos are large and fragile.
This thread offers a safe place for folks to respond to UD posts and comments without the threat (or the reality) of censorship. It’s also a good place to cross-post and preserve UD comments that you think are likely to be censored.
If the thread becomes popular, we can sticky it or otherwise make it easily accessible from the TSZ home page.
* I kid you not – look at the bottom left corner of the UD home page.
A good place to start is with this comment from Pro Hac Vice which was posted in the Sandbox:
Related to UD: Does anyone have any inside information on what, if anything, happened at Amarillo?
All I see is a bunch of way over the top outrage at ENV and UD, with mirth at The Sensuous Curmudgeon. What I have not seen, is actual trustworthy reports of actual events.
Thanks, keiths.
Neil, it’s interesting that the commenters at UD aren’t freaking out about Amarillo College, just Cordova and News. They may be picking up on the disparity between Luskin’s hysterical rhetoric and the actual facts he reports.
The closest I could find to a reasonably unbiased report on the situation at Amarillo is this: http://amarillo.com/opinion/opinion-columnist/weekly-opinion-columnist/2013-08-24/henry-amarillo-college-sidesteps And it’s not unbiased, clearly buying into the “teach the controversy” nonsense. The text, apparently not required, was to be Explore Evolution: The Arguments For and Against Neo-Darwinism . It may be that none of this is new to anyone, it’s just the closest to a simple report that I could find.
Obviously it wasn’t a major issue, being a non-credit community course at a college, where presumably just about anything could be taught. On the other hand, what could possibly be taught with respect to ID? I know of nothing but negativity toward evolution and the faux assumption that ID is the default that could be thought to “make the case for ID,” clearly don’t make a case for ID. Instead of “Evolution vs. Intelligent Design,” why not “Science vs. Superstition,” “Physics vs. Animism,” or some other “matchup” that actually advertises what’s at stake?
If properly taught, not necessarily a bad thing, despite not labeling it to indicate that ID is woo. If it was giving credence to pseudoscience, it really has no real place at college, despite the fact that it almost certainly would be constitutional. The BS textbook for the ID side doesn’t give me any confidence that it would have stuck up for evidence-based reasoning.
Glen Davidson
Pro Hac Vice,
GlenDavidson,
Thanks. It’s still not clear why Amarillo College made the decision that they made, but it looks as if it is the kind of decisions that such institutions make. The reaction at ENV and UD sure looks excessive.
Excessive reaction is all that the intelligent design movement has to offer.
I searched Amarillo College’s Continuing Education page to see what they offered in regards to Biology. Nothing. So then I tried ‘Science’ and this is what came back:
Citizen Science (grades 3-6)
GED & Employ Skills Science/S
GED & Emply Skills” Science/S
GED & Emply Skills: Science/S
Gross Me Out!
Shocking Science (grades 3-6)
Is we assume the three GED classes are really one, that’s a total of four general science classes — two high school level, two grade school level. Perhaps its presumptuous of me, but the ID course seems out of place here.
In its academic program, however, Amarillo does offer a variety of basic science courses, profession-specific programs, and A.S. degrees, including a Biology major. There are two tracks (one for Science majors and one for non-Science majors) so it’s conceivable that a class focused exclusively on evolution and/or intelligent design would fit here. But its fair to say that overall, the catalog offers only the most fundamental, general courses. My guess is that they don’t have the resources to do more than that.
Here is a link to some comments by the “evil atheist” Jamie Farren himself. Looks like he did a bang-up job of documenting the attempts to push Meyer’s Creationist book off on students as being an honest and fair critique.
AC: What Do You Think
Notice Mr. Farren’s offer to publicly debate the topic of evolution vs. ID and explain why the actions were necessary. I notice not a single IDiot including the professional liars at the DI took him up on it.
I have never been censored at UD.
I have been censored like crazy crazy dumb everywhere else. Its hilarious but irritating. I have been censored on creationist forums.
Origin contentions is a intellectual contact sport.
The bible says In all contentions there is pride. meaning people arguing get their pride up. Intelligent people, only they care about origin contentions beyond a first blush of interest, don’t like being told they are wrong. Its like being told we are dumb when we are and think we are pretty sharp because we spent our lives trying to be.
When contenders fight its understood you might be wrong and can’t complain about the other guys insistence.
There should be no censorship on public forums except to stop open expressions of malice or serious interference with the topic. serious.
Otherwise , adults, deal with it and don’t wimp out and leave your pride at the door.
It seems a lot of people never worked in a warehouse, played hockey, or were married.
Creationists are better always coming from certain demographics and being the outsiders and learning one must get along.
I wish there was bigger and more forums to fight these things out for truth and progress. This forum is uniquely freethinking and I’m not banned or censored or called a troll (whatever that is) and foolishly treated.
Just warn posters and control topic changing and open expressions of malice (not suspicions).
Then victory will come to the smarter guys. this is not for kids.
Back to the original purpose of the thread, a comment “awaiting moderation” at Uncommon Descent:
It appears that at most REC followed your own citation to pages 45-46, didn’t find the quote, and assumed that the quote was a fabrication. Despite your outrage (when was the last time you had a civil and friendly conversation with someone who disagreed with you? I can’t recall seeing such on this blog) he didn’t accuse YOU of fabricating the quote. He accused you of using a fabricated quote. There is a stark difference. It’s obvious by now that you were plucking those quotations from out-of-context online sources, after all.
REC made an understandable mistake, given that he was following your own mis-citation. When he found the material on a different page, he acknowledged that fact and explained in detail why your citation to it was inappropriate in context.
I think the correction was the proper thing to do. I dont think there’s any need to “immediately to take down every reference” to the offending material. Not all websites are as reliant on censorship as yours.
And of course, you have never applied such a standard to yourself. For example, some time ago you quote-mined Justice Ginsburg to imply that she supported eugenics. Reading the quotation in context, it’s quite clear that you misrepresented her. You did not correct yourself, as REC did. You did not remove the insulting material, as you are now demanding. You simply let it stand. Why are there two standards, one for Barry Arrington and one for the rest of the world?
Apparently I have a WordPress login!!! This post will never appear on UD, but I thought I’d clear my name in my first, and likely only post here. This place is a bit too classy for the likes of me.
So, let us add a bit more context, to Barry’s accusations built on one-liners shall we?
The link for my post:
http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=14;t=7305;st=10470#entry229212
My second post:
http://www.antievolution.org/cgi-bin/ikonboard/ikonboard.cgi?act=ST;f=14;t=7305;st=10470#entry229227
I think from the first post it is quite clear I offered 2 opinions on status of the the quote–it was either fabricated or mis-cited, and never accused Barry of being the fabricator (quite the opposite–“copy and paste” it is and will remain). And if we have to exclude a mis-cited quote from existing in a book, set of books, or the whole literature, what kind of standard is that? If I go looking for a quote in a term paper from a student, and it ain’t there, or it is misrepresented–at least 1 letter grade it is. It is either there, and correct, or phantom-BS-fabrication, in my opinion. I don’t have the time and resources to rule it out existing somewhere. Scholarship.
When I was offered an alternate citation from another source for the correct page from a AtBC poster, I actually took the time to go back to the library, and did manage to locate the quote for Barry. It is badly, badly, horribly out of context, discussing transitions within species, and not transitional fossils (see second post).
Barry could post both comments in their entirety, and let his readers judge for themselves.
Also, the owner of this blog has been called mentally insufficient, among other things at UD. Others I know have been called immoral, addled drug addicts, insane, by their “real name,” against their desire to remain anonymous. TsErik threatens to injure people in letters to their employers on Barry’s website. So counter-suits?
My hesitation to post, as stated in the second post, seems somewhat prescient to Barry’s threats, and urging others to seek council.
I would be absolutely astonished if this turned into legal action. (Caveat: I’m a lawyer, but not your lawyer. Nothing but my personal opinions here.) In practice, defamation suits typically require a showing of damages. Arrington hasn’t been damaged by this nonsense, and a judge would laugh him out of court if he claimed otherwise. Particularly since, as you observed, you never accused him of fabricating anything.
On the off chance that Arrington’s temper gets the better of him and he tries to make good on the implied threat, consider seeking pro bono counsel from free speech advocates such as the guys at Popehat. They’re quite good about helping people deal with legal bullies.
(Footnote–Arrington has been accused in the past of having sued political opponents for calling him a “bully,” which would obviously be nothing more than proving the point. I was curious, so I looked up the case. Turns out that he actually sued because they allegedly accused him, in a campaign mailer, of having bullied and physically threatened his enemies. He lost the case, but while his theory didn’t prevail it wasn’t crazy. The case seems to have been about the allegation that he threatened physical harm, not just that he was called a “bully.”)
No sane person would take seriously a threat of physical harm from Arrington.
If I recall the opinion correctly, he alleged he never made such a threat and the defendants didn’t contest his claim.
What’s the requirement for frivolous litigation?
A fine sense of the absurd?
Reciprocating Bill,
+50 for this comment.
Slim odds that anyone at UD will get the reference.
keiths,
I’m afraid I don’t get it myself. 🙁
My latest contribution, once again censored without explanation. I assume because Mr. Arrington would rather spam UD with new comment threads attacking Dr. Matzke than actually address his own conduct.
—
I assume you mean “defamation” in its legal sense, as you advised REC to get counsel over at TSZ. So you might reconsider whether you meet some of the requirements of defamation: a false statement about another, made negligently, that causes the complainant actual harm. The exact elements vary by jurisdiction, but those are fairly universal requirements. In my opinion you can’t meet any of these requirements. I think that’s so obvious that I don’t understand why you keep claiming that you were defamed.
(I’m going to steal Popehat’s disclaimer. They do great work protecting free speech by finding pro bono representation for bloggers threatened with defamation suits.
Note: this is not legal advice. You pay for legal advice. You should not look for legal advice from the Internet, the place you go to get pictures of ungrammatical cats and theories about why the Belgians are behind 9/11. You should go to a real lawyer to get legal advice suited to your situation and your jurisdiction.)
REC’s comment that the quotation was fabricated is not a false statement about you. He clearly meant—and in fact explicitly stated in an earlier post—that he thought you copied and pasted material you found somewhere else. (I think that’s probably accurate, based on your dodging of the question here and the fact that your Eldredge excerpts exactly match the citations and elliptical punctuation of various creationist blurbs online.) He never said or even implied that you fabricated the quote.
And of course, as others have pointed out to you, your quotation of REC above omits part of his statement: “It was fabricated:* …. *Or comes from some other source/place in this book.” The complete statement, that the material was either fabricated or comes from somewhere else in the book, isn’t false. So how can it be defamatory?
(Cutting out the second half of the statement is just more quote mining. It misrepresents what he actually said. You tried to minimize this rather telling point above by implying that the qualifier was “way down in the body,” but that’s not true. There was an asterisk on the very sentence you are complaining about.)
Even if there was a false statement, you would need to establish that REC was negligent (or acted with intent). But how was REC negligent? He looked for material you quoted in the edition you cited on the pages you specified. When he didn’t find it, he wrote that it was “falsified” but then explicitly acknowledged that the quote could also have just come from somewhere else in the book. How is that qualification negligent? How is his original statement negligent when he so qualified it?
I also don’t understand how you could possibly think that you were damaged. You’ve established your own reputation with your own conduct here and elsewhere. Your post here, for example, says more about your approach to using quotations than REC ever could.
Keep shovelling Barry. Your hole isn’t deep enough.
One more, then I think I’ll let well enough alone:
You falsely accused REC of claiming that you fabricated a quote when he explicitly took the position that you had just lifted it from some other source without reading it in its original context. (It’s fairly clear by now that he was right. I know that I was taught in law school never to do that. Perhaps you weren’t.) You also snipped the punctuation off the end of REC’s comment, creating a badly misleading version of his statement.
Will you “own up to” or apologize for your false accusation that REC claimed you fabricated a quote? Will you take responsibility for your misleading excerpt of his comments? Will you do the right thing and “apologize for [your] boorish accusations” that Justice Ginsburg supports eugenics?
I think you’re in “spin mode” right now, attacking attacking attacking to distract attention from the fact that you quote-mined REC and falsely accused him of making an allegation he never made. Why not demonstrate the virtue you are demanding from others and apologize for your false accusation?
KN,
It’s a reference to Kahneman and Tversky’s illustration of the conjunction fallacy.
I wonder if Barry thinks not reading a contract is an excuse for not complying with its provisions.
I think he just knows that his fans won’t hold him to any higher standard at UD, and he hates his critics too much to care what they think.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EkS6R0YtobQ
“Critics” is not quite right, because that suggests something of the “come, let us reason together in the marketplace of ideas” ethos with which Lizzie founded this blog. Arrington is a battle-scarred culture warrior (just like Mullins and Murray); for them, this is war, and we are their enemies. The reason why he doesn’t care what we think is because this isn’t a dialogue to them, it’s a war — a war between Light (reason, evidence, design/creationism, theism, Christianity) and Darkness (irrationality, dogma, evolution, atheism, and materialism). And in war, there are no rules — one does everything one can in order to win.
KN,
That’s very depressing, but it seems consistent with their inability to have a civil conversation with those who disagree with them.
Mark Frank has been trying to point out that Arrington may not understand probability well enough to spit venom at a scientist who is asking some cogent questions about the hypothetical. (BA is partly upset, I think, because it’s poor form to “fight the hypo” in law school. You learn to just go with the problem as set up and try to deal with it. But that’s (a) because the problems are set up by actual learned authorities who know what they’re doing, which BA is not in this case, and (b) because legal and ethical hypos don’t need to be as strictly constrained as physics scenarios.)
MF raised the Prosecutor’s Fallacy in an effort to remind BA that, of course, being a lawyer has not prepared him at all for the conversation he’s trying to dominate. (Which may be why he has only volume and spite with which to do so; his substantive contributions are negligible.) I learned about the PF from Alan Dershowitz in my first-year Crim class. He used People v. Collins as an example. Basically, witnesses saw an interracial couple flee the scene of a robbery in a yellow car. A couple matching that description was pulled over and arrested. At trial, the prosecution identified all sorts of discrete facts about the couple: the man’s facial hair, each individual’s race, the fact that the couple was mixed-race, the woman’s hair style, the color of the car, etc. They put a specific probability to each fact to point out that it was astronomically unlikely that there was another couple matching that description driving around at the same time, so these people must have been guilty. The state supreme court overturned the conviction because the statistical evidence effectively deprived the jury of its fact-finding role.
The interesting thing was how Dershowitz handled the lesson. He was trying to multiply all the probabilities together to show how the prosecution was right that pair was almost certainly guilty. (He was playing devil’s advocate.) But he didn’t do the math properly–I forget exactly what he did, but I think he was adding denominators instead of multiplying.
One of the students in the class raised a hand and pointed out his mistake. But Dershowitz wouldn’t accept that he was wrong! He kept insisting that he had plenty of experience, that he knew how to do probabilities, and even that once an expert witness had told him he wasn’t doing the math right in a similar case but that he’d figured it out in the end.
The student turned out to have some kind of STEM degree from Cal Tech, if I remember right. And of course the student was right, Dershowitz was doing the math wrong. But he simply couldn’t acknowledge that he’d made a mistake. I don’t think he was too embarrassed to do so, I think it honestly never occurred to him that he might be wrong.
I see plenty of that online, of course. I’m still trying to write a book about productive conversations between diametrically opposed viewpoints, particularly in anonymous (or functionally anonymous) online conversations.
But Barry Arrington takes it to a new level. I have never seen him even consider the possibility that he might be in error, even in cases where he was obviously factually wrong (such as his false accusation of REC and, my personal pet peeve, his nasty sliming of Justice Ginsburg as a eugenecist based on a quote-mine). It may be that it simply doesn’t occur to him that he might have been wrong, or that it’s wrong to quote-mine people to mislead his readers, or that he should take responsibility when he does mislead people. But more than that, he refuses to consider that someone might disagree with him in good faith. Nick Matzke must see the hypo the same way BA does, I must admit that denying the objectivity of BA’s morality is absurd, Dr. Liddle must be utterly irrational not to agree with the following statements outright…. there simply isn’t any room for diverging opinions.
It seems to me that there is a fairly clear pattern in BA’s censorship. He’s willing to put up with people who answer questions in ways he doesn’t like, as he enjoys berating them. But people who ask questions, particularly difficult or open-ended questions that take the discussion somewhere he’s not prepared to go, are not tolerated for long. I think that’s because he is deeply uncomfortable with conversations that wander outside his preconceptions. Given that one of his primary preconceptions is that people who disagree with him are wicked and/or stupid, you might predict that Dr. Liddle’s politeness and insightfulness would upset him. And of course they did.
I’ve been silently banned from UD. I suspect the last straw was my comment, which BA suppressed, asking him why he accused REC of defamation based on a misleadingly edited version of REC’s claim. BA resorted to censorship rather than answering the question, which was fairly predictable.
Keeping this safe:
Ok. I’ll start with #9:
No, theism did not predict that. Theism – your version of it anyway – predicted complex and diverse animal life to appear in the seas and the skies in God’s fifth day of creation. I’m sure you know this. I’m sure you also know that your version of theism also predicted complex and diverse land plants before the appearance of sea creatures. Since there are no birds or bats or even flying insects found among the Cambrian explosion fossils, and no fruit trees or other land plants that precede them, your theism is demonstrably false according to your own standards. Refuted. Finished. Demolished.
Of course simpler marine organism fossils have been found prior to the Cambrian explosion – Dickinsonia, Charnia, Cyclomedusa for example – and there were many millennia of even simpler single-celled organisms before then, and there were larger walking/flying/backboned/big-brained/etc organisms afterwards, so the evolutionary prediction of complexity gradually unfolding has been validated. But that’s just icing on the cake – your theism is already in tatters. Game over. Try something else.
However, since I don’t like leaving tasks unfinished, I might as well respond to the rest of your “evidence”. I’ll start by pointing out that you hardly provided any evidence at all, just assertions, and most of those assertions are false. For instance,
No it didn’t. Steady state cosmology and the big bang were competing theories within naturalistic science; neither was a prediction of it. Some ancient philosophers believed the wold was infinitely ancient, but that was not a pediction either. If you feel like disputing this, provide the basis for the prediction. A random quote fom a theist claiming that naturalism predicted an infinite past won’t suffice.
No, some varieties of theism incorporate that idea (Hindusim doesn’t), and those that do invariably place the creation date as far far too recent.
Big Bang theory does not indicate that it was a creation event – that’s your own interpretation. But I’ll be generous and allow that theism predicted the universe had a beginning – I can afford it.
Not that I’m aware of.
Even if this is so – and I note you haven’t given enough details for anyone to be sure what you’re referring to – I don’t see any reason to connect whatever the universe is dependent on with your god.
Finally something that’s actually a prediction. However,
No it doesn’t. You appear to be misunderstanding the quantum consciousness hypothesis. In any case, there is nothing I am aware of in quantum mechanics to show that consciousness preceded material reality, and a lot of evidence from cosmology that it didn’t, so theism is refuted here too.
Says who? AFAICT you are simply turning eliminated possibilities into imagined pedictions.
…which although compatible with your theistic prediction, does not actually support it – much like the existence of pineapple pizza is compatible with God being outside time, but not actually supportive of it.
As an aside, Psalm 90:4 doesn’t have anything to do with God being eternal or outside of time, but refers to God being far far older than the author.
Of course it is – if it wasn’t, us carbon-based lifeforms wouldn’t be here to discuss it. I suggest you bush up on the anthropic principle.
As for your theistic pediction, it falls very flat with the realisation that man occupies such a vanishingly small fraction of the universe that even if the universe was created for carbon-based life forms, there’s no reason to think it was created for us.
This contradicts the previous ‘prediction’ – if the entire universe was created with man in mind, then places where man can survive should be common and the Earth should not be extremely unique. Conversely, if the Earth is extremely unique, then the universe was not created for our benefit since we cannot easily exploit it. No evidence is necessary here – theism is self-refuting.
No, it doesn’t indicate that. There may have been oceans on Earth for 600,000,000 years before the oldest sedimentary rocks we have found were formed – and 600,000,000 years is a very long time in which life could have developed. Furthemore, the evidence of life in those oldest rocks consists only of chemical traces and isotope ratios – there is nothing I am aware of that indicates that the life then was complex, let alone photo-synthetic rather than chemosynthetic. I think you made that up.
And this prediction is borne out by billions of years of single-celled organisms being followed by colonies of undifferentiated cells then colonies of differentiated organisms followed by multicelled organisms.
That’s not a prediction, it’s an untestable and meaningless assertion.
Since the simplest life form currently found on Earth has an evolutionary history as long as all the other lifeforms, it is no more equivalent to the first life than is a giraffe. Denton’s statement is irrelevant.
And there are. Far more than the few dozen you refer to. In fact, there are so many that it’s possible to pick enough with rhyming names to create a parody of the Major-General’s song from The Pirates of Penzance.
Two billion years of single-celled organisms is not rapid diversity. Theism is refuted again.
Of the hundreds of transitionals, only a small minority are addressed by creationists at all. The only way in which they could possibly be described as ‘contested’ is by pretending that some ignorant yahoo exclaiming “there ain’t no trans’nal fossuls” counts as a contestation. If you want to continue to claim that not one is uncontested, produce a discussion of why (to pick a random example) Eotheroides is not transitional.
This is new to me. Obviously the naturalist prediction has prevailed, since speciation continues to occur (e.g. among London mosquitoes, apple flies, cichlids). Equally obviously the theistic prediction is total bollocks, since polar bears, dingoes, musk-oxen and maybe woolly mammoths postdate Homo sapiens. The last claim is equally untrue, since even after eliminating possible wiggle-room by (i) looking for an entire genus of fossils rather than a single species, and (ii) ensuring that the fossils had some additional feature that distinguished them from earlier forms to a greater extent than humans are different from chimps, it took very little time to find a counterexample: the earliest Doedicurus fossils postdate Homo by more than a million years.
The ENCODE research only showed that most of our DNA was transcribed – not that it wasn’t junk – and doesn’t demonstrate we’re wonderfully made even if none of our DNA is junk. Anyway, the Boston Globe article is far removed from the actual research report.
No it didn’t. If anything, naturalism predicts that mutations are random with respect to fitness, not that they are extremely beneficial.
Once again that’s not a prediction but an untestable theory.
That’s just gibberish. The mutation rate is clearly not detrimental, otherwise we wouldn’t be here. And most mutations have negligible effects. Even mutations to genes are largely neutral, since most mutations are point mutations and about a third of those don’t even change protein amino-acid sequences.
Again, only by ignorant yahoos who think announcing that ‘99% of all mutations are detrimental’ counts as serious questioning. Any-one who has even the slightest expertise on the topic should be aware of the known beneficial mutations such as ApoA-1 Milano.
You need to provide a reference to morality being “Embedded to the point of eliciting physiological responses in humans … prior to the event even happening.” because it resembles bovine faeces.
Final tally:
– Five naturalism predictions upheld, only one contradicted (and that by apparent newage)
– Only one theism prediction upheld; six disproven.
The rest were non-conclusive or simply not predictions at all.
When misrepresentations are corrected, and fabrications are replaced by the actual data, naturalism survives and theism gets shredded.
Roy
Roy,
Hey, that was a fun read. Thanks for copying it here.